Issue 119 examines historical and contemporary moments of cultural encounter in communities on the Indian Ocean and to the East; from Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania to China. Guest Editor Krishna Lewis presents a glimpse of cross cultural interaction in these spaces. The evening’s discussion hopes to further the issue’s conversations on gender, identity, and displacement and on reconstructing histories and trajectories across the Afro-Asian and Indian Ocean worlds.

Copies of Transition 119 will be on hand to purchase at a special promotional price. The issue features contributions to the Afro-Asian Worlds cluster from M. G. Vassanji, Erin Haney, Jatin Dua, Steven Nelson, Bill V. Mullen, and Lisa María Burgess. The issue also highlights activism in its various forms, with insights from multiple generations of civil rights leaders in St. Louis, Missouri; startling statistics about the history of solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system; and a portrait of undersung South African poet and activist, Edward Vincent Swart.

Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur

Gaiutra Bahadur is an award-winning American journalist who writes frequently about migration, literature and gender. Her reporting, criticism and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Dissent, History Today,Washington Post Book World, The Nation, Foreign Policy Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The (London) Observer and Ms., among other publications. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture is her first book. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Book Prize, the British award for political writing that is artful, and won the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize, awarded by scholars of the Caribbean to the best book about the Caribbean published in the previous three years.

Ibrahim K. Sundiata

Ibrahim K. Sundiata

Ibrahim K. Sundiata is emeritus professor of African/Afro-American Studies and History at Brandeis University. His initial field work was in Equatorial Guinea and Liberia. His present interests are social justice in comparative perspective as reflected through the prisms of class, gender, color, and sexuality. In the past several years he has traveled extensively in Australia, Ghana, Brazil, and the Middle East. Sundiata is former chair of the History Department at Howard University and a past fellow of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. On a Fulbright, he taught at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. Sundiata is the author of four books. His fifth will be Not Out of Dixie: Slavery and the American Identity Crisis.

Krishna Lewis

Krishna Lewis

Krishna Lewis is the Director of the Fellows Program at the Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Previously she taught literature and continues to be drawn to the stories we tell each other about culture, women, and place. She is the guest editor of the Afro-Asian Worlds materials in Transition 119.

Roshan Galvaan

Roshan Galvaan

Roshan Galvaan is an Associate professor in the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Cape Town. She is the current Mandela Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. A South African scholar and therapist of South Asian descent, she is interested in individuals’ capacities to reflect on their power associated with race and class identities in social and professional contexts.

Vivek Bald

Vivek Bald

Vivek Bald is Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT and adocumentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013). His films include Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) and Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003). Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering the histories of peddlers and steamship workers from British colonial India who came to the United States under the shadows of anti-Asian immigration laws and settled within U.S. communities of color in the early 20th century. The project consists of the Bengali Harlem book as well as a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, (currently in production), and a digital oral history website in development at bengaliharlem.com.

From

To

Harvard Book Store1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

Event Series: Transition Magazine

Born in Africa and bred in the diaspora, Transition is a unique forum for the freshest, most compelling, most curious ideas about race. Since its founding in Uganda in 1961, the magazine has kept apace of the rapid transformation of the black world and has remained a leading forum of intellectual debate. Now, in an age that demands ceaseless improvisation, they aim to be both an anchor of deep reflection on black life and a map charting new routes through the globalized world.

Transition is a publication of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, published three times annually by Indiana University Press. Find Transition on Twitter at @Transition_Mag and on the web at http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition. Transition partners with Harvard Book Store several times a year for a discussion based on their latest issue.